Building And Operating An Internal Cloud With Automic At Nordea

Nordea, one of the largest banks in Scandinavia, has used software from Automic to develop an internal cloud that automates the connection of IT processes to workflow.

“They have built an internal cloud with business services that can spin up or spin down, “ said Todd DeLaughter, CEO of Automic. “We let them deliver services in minutes rather than weeks. We can provision infrastructure, like standing up an instance of Hadoop to let them ingest data.”

Nordea took its existing infrastructure and layered on Automic, DeLaughter added, giving it the ability to interconnect heterogenous systems and exchange data.

Nordea started using Automic as a scheduling system some years ago to run workload automation, said Jesper Christensen, the bank’s chief IT infrastructure specialist.

“We have extended it to be the back end engine for provisioning of different IT services. For instance, if we want to create a new server, we can do that using Automic. If a user needs access to a server we have created self-serve where a user requests what he needs and Automic does the work on the back end.”

The bank is just starting to using Automic for big data, he added.

“Every time something needs to be automated and there is more than one technology involved, we use Automic — it connects to everything,” Christensen said. “We have just about 10,000 Automic OS agents running. Every time we start a new Windows or Linux or Unix box we install an Automic OS agent on the machine.”

The OS agent is the interface that connects to the specific OS an app or other resource resides on.

“We also use the agents to connect to the correct database,” said Christensen. “On the Oracle side, we have an active and standby database and we have an agent for both. The agents are connected through a virtual IP address so you can switch the databases as you want and don’t have to have any changes in your workflow.”

Some of what Nordea does would have been impossible before it installed Automic, largely because of the difficulty making connections. Automic lets it automate connections on the OS level and on the database level and connect through a Web service.

“We have some old legacy systems we need to maintain, and by using solutions from Automic we can still get the data into our data warehouses. We are looking into getting rid of mainframes, but that will take some years,” Christensen added.

The bank has recently announced it will replace its core system with one from Temenos, a project that will be managed by Accenture and is expected to take four to five years.

With Automic, the bank’s IT department can provide servers, and services, to business units in hours rather than the weeks it used to take.

“Now it is just a small automated process. Once the manager approves a request, the process is kicked off automatically.

“This is very forward thinking,” Automic’s DeLaughter added, “and it is going where we think IT will need to go — to provide the ability to not only have a single cloud infrastructure but be able to move from one cloud infrastructure to an external cloud infrastructure. No bank will be single source cloud operator dependent.”

Automic has been listed as a representative ‘established and active vendor’ in Gartner’s recent Market Guide for Application Release Automation (ARA) Solutions, which the analyst firm said is “driven by growing business demands for rapid (if not continuous) delivery of new applications, features and updates.”